Journal-writing and diary-keeping are a kind of secret exhibitionism, the genteel equivalent of scrawling on lavatory walls. This seems to be the message of 'Mene, Mene, Tekel, Up-harsin', one of John Cheever's loopy, luminescent, triumphant later stories. The narrator, returning to America after a long absence, enters a stall in the men's room at Grand Central Station, and there, etched into the marble partition ('it might have been a giallo antico, but then I noticed Paleozoic fossils beneath the high polish and guessed that the stone was madrepore,' Cheever notes in an uncharacteristic piece of shake-it-for-the-world High Bellowesque omniscience), he finds not the spurting pricks and lewdnesses he was expecting, but 'organised into panels, like the pages of a book', passages that might have been lifted from the commonplace-books and journals of his neighbours in the well-heeled, well-lit suburbs of upstate New York.

LRB 9 January 1992 | PDF Download